Archive for:

Only 40 authors “make money” on Amazon! The horror! All the rest don’t make any money says author Claude Forthomme on her blog. This startling claim came to my attention because it’s been making the rounds on Facebook, and my bull-sh*t detectors went off immediately.

It’s all about math. The actual announcement from Amazon was that close to 40 independent authors had sold more than a million copies of their e-books. Let’s assume an average sale price of $3.99, of which the author gets 70 percent, so we’re talking about $2.80/e-book. That means that if an author sold the minimum of one million in five years, they were netting $560,000/year. Awesome! But surely they’re not the only authors making money. What about the ones making $10,000/year or $50,000/year?